Juli Beth Hinds, AICP (Director of Planning & Zoning, City ...ran/...education_conference_South_Burlington_example.pdfAdapting and Scaling Social Marketing Techniques to Regional,

Adapting and Scaling Social Marketing Techniques to Regional, Municipal and Neighborhood Stormwater Objectives: A Case Study from South Burlington and Chittenden County, Vermont

Juli Beth Hinds, AICP (Director of Planning & Zoning, City of South Burlington, VT); Alexey Voinov, Ph.D. (Associate Professor, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics, University of Vermont); Patricia Heffernan, MBA, CMC (Principal, Marketing Partners, Inc., Burlington, VT) I. Introduction

Communities engaged in stormwater issues face a complex landscape of public

objectives, constituencies, and constraints. While social marketing techniques have been

used successfully across the nation in stormwater awareness, education and behavior

change campaigns, especially as communities work to fulfill the requirements of EPA’s

Phase II Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) rule, social marketing also shows

promise for transfer beyond the typical school-based or local audience into arenas with

different constraints and objectives.

Affecting behavior change around stormwater management at other decision-

making levels, particularly when money is at stake, requires careful adaptation of social

marketing techniques and a special focus on scale: the scale of the target audience,

financial implications, geography, and decision-making process involved. The three-part

regional, local and neighborhood education campaigns underway in Chittenden County and

the City of South Burlington, Vermont show how the creative adaptation and scaling of

social marketing techniques can go well beyond conventional education for behavior

change. Particularly at a neighborhood level, social marketing techniques can be used to

introduce whole-systems thinking about stormwater management.

Whole-systems thinking, which has been expressed as “…a process through which

the interconnections between systems are actively considered, and solutions are sought that

address multiple problems at the same time1,” is often lost in the pressure to meet

stormwater permit standards, minimize per-unit costs, avoid regulatory complications, and

1 Wilson, Alex et al., Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate. Snowmass, Co: Rocky Mountain Institute, 1998.

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simplify issues for the public. Typically used in the same context as “sustainability,” and

most often applied to regional issues around resource consumption, the whole-systems

objective of finding solutions that address multiple problems can apply directly to local

stormwater financing, regional coordination, stormwater system design, and notably,

decision-making around localized stormwater management approaches.

This paper outlines the regulatory context, public objectives, and social marketing

techniques being used simultaneously at regional, municipal and neighborhood scales and

the implications for whole-systems thinking: (1) the Chittenden County Regional

Stormwater Education Program (RSEP), which has gained national acclaim as an

innovative and cost-saving inter-municipal approach to meeting MS4 education

requirements; (2) establishment of Vermont’s first stormwater utility in the City of South

Burlington; and (3) the joint University of Vermont-City of South Burlington “Redesigning

the American Neighborhood” (RAN) project in the Butler Farms neighborhood, which is

evaluating the social acceptability and environmental outcomes of different scales of

stormwater management approaches in a neighborhood facing an expensive stormwater

system upgrade. The paper evaluates how issues of scale have affected program design and

outcomes, and summarizes implications of the lessons learned for increasing systems

thinking and providing more meaningful public engagement in stormwater management.

II. Project Setting: Chittenden County and South Burlington, Vermont

A swirl of high-profile lawsuits, legislation, municipal activity and regulatory

changes has made “stormwater” a household word for the 141,000 residents2 of Chittenden

County, Vermont (Figure 1) between 2001 and today. This highly complex political

2 Data based on the U.S. 1997 Economic Census and City of South Burlington data.

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situation, which received extensive media coverage, largely defined the initial information

needs, and behavior change objectives of the three education and outreach programs.

Figure 1. Location Map

Home to 23 percent of the state’s people and jobs, and most of the area subject to the

EPA Phase II MS4 rule, Chittenden County also has more than its share of Vermont’s urban

stormwater management problems. The County is home to nine of the seventeen streams

on the State’s 303(d) list of waters impaired by urban stormwater runoff (Figure 2). Most

of these streams discharge directly into Lake Champlain, prized for recreation and the

drinking water source for most of the County. The Lake’s phosphorus TMDL attributes

roughly 30 percent of the nonpoint source load to runoff from urbanized land in Vermont3.

The Lowe’s Case: As of 2001, when the State began gearing up to implement the

Phase II rule, no TMDLs had been prepared for these impaired waters and over 1,000 state

stormwater discharge permits had expired - most without notice to the property owners. As

a result, Chittenden County and especially the City of South Burlington became the

epicenter of a political and legal crisis in June 2001 when the Vermont Water Resources

3 Lake Champlain Phosphorus TMDL. Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation and New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, September 25, 2002, Fig. 2, page 5.

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Figure 2. Stormwater-Impaired Watersheds in South Burlington & Location of Butler Farms

ruled that no new or increased discharges of pollutants could be added to any impaired

waterway without a TMDL4. This ruling, known as the Lowe’s case, halted stormwater

permit issuance and renewals in impaired watersheds, stalled many property transfers and

developments, and set off a multi-year legal and legislative process to clear the expired

permit backlog, develop TMDLs, and clarify permit standards for new development.

Regional Stormwater Education Program: About the same time as the Lowe’s

case was decided, public works managers and planners from the municipalities and other

agencies subject to the Phase II MS4 permit (notably Burlington International Airport and

the Vermont Agency of Transportation) were meeting monthly to discuss implications of

4 In re: Hannaford Bros. Co. and Lowes Home Centers, Inc., Docket No. WQ-01-01, Memorandum of Decision. Vermont Water Resources Board, Jun. 29, 2001.

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the Phase II permit. There was a shared concern that if handled locally, public education

and outreach compliance might consist only of local officials reprinting EPA brochure

templates. This was not seen as an efficient or effective use of money or time.

From this shared concern arose the concept for an inter-municipal agreement to

develop a regional education plan, funded jointly by all of the permittees, with the

professional resources and capabilities to accomplish an effective campaign. There was

strong support from the legislative bodies of all of the permittees, as well as the Agency of

Natural Resources, and through a Memorandum of Understanding the RSEP was

established in January 2003. Funding was done on a formula basis with each permittee

contributing an annual amount equal to what the State estimated would be required to

meet the permit condition individually. This yielded a five year budget of $250,000.

Through a competitive bid process, a consulting firm with strong media and social

marketing expertise (as opposed to environmental advocacy or municipal government

experience) was chosen to prepare a five-year strategy, including pre- and post-program

surveys to help define target audiences, desired behavior changes, barriers, motivators, and

measures of success.

South Burlington’s Stormwater Utility: Also at the same time, the City of South

Burlington had begun exploring a municipal stormwater utility to deal with its unique land

use environment. South Burlington, with 17,000 residents, is Vermont’s fifth-largest

municipality and its fastest growing by far, with an annual average of 250 new housing

units and a burgeoning employment base. Home to Burlington International Airport,

Vermont’s largest regional shopping mall, and six miles of public roads per square mile of

land, the City also contains all or part of six impaired watersheds and over a quarter of the

State’s expired stormwater permits.

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Faced with the pressing need for a stable and robust funding stream to deal with

back-logged capital projects and increased maintenance requirements, and a desire on the

part of the City Council and staff to do watershed planning in a more integrated manner

than the State was proposing, the City spent three years studying its stormwater

management options. In March of 2005, amid the regional education and outreach

campaign, the City Council established Vermont’s first stormwater utility by ordinance,

with a fee of $4.50 per month per equivalent residential unit (ERU)5. The ordinance

survived Vermont’s thirty-day public appeal period unchallenged, and billing began in July.

The utility offered a critical carrot to City homeowners affected by the Lowe’s case:

The ordinance stipulates that any residential system that has been upgraded to meet

current State standards can be taken over by the utility, regardless of the status of the

system’s State permit. The City’s offer to place itself between individual residents and the

State permit quagmire greatly increased the perceived value of the utility to residents.

However, as the Butler Farms case is demonstrating, this policy also creates a strong

incentive for homeowners and associations to upgrade stormwater systems to State

standards as quickly and cheaply as possible, which may or may not be consistent with

whole-systems thinking about watersheds and stormwater management options.

The Butler Farms Neighborhood: Stuck between the State’s legal and permit

tangle and the City’s new utility were two dozen residential subdivisions in South

Burlington whose residents gradually discovered, after Lowe’s, that their homes are subject

to long-expired State stormwater discharge permits, and that their systems do not meet

current State standards. Butler Farms was one such neighborhood. This classic half-acre

5 ERU refers to the average amount of impervious surface of a single-family residence (2,700 SF in South Burlington), with other properties charged based on the number of ERUs of impervious surface owned.

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lot single-family subdivision of 253 homes is subject to two different stormwater permits

(both expired), has no homeowners’ association, and is plagued by localized flooding and

stream quality problems. Problems with home sales in the wake of Lowe’s, frustration with

flooding, and confusion about the relationship between the City’s utility and the State

permit impasse led to frustration and even outright anger on the part of residents.

During this period, the University of Vermont’s Rubenstein School of Natural

Resources (UVM-SNR) began looking for a candidate neighborhood for a research and

community involvement project called “Redesigning the American Neighborhood,” aimed

at exploring how community decision-making affected the choice and scale of stormwater

management interventions. Working with City officials, UVM-SNR faculty and staff began

discussions with Butler Farms residents and eventually began outreach within the larger

neighborhood. At its outset in 2003, the RAN project intended to provide information, but

also to work on defining the communication and decision-making problems within the

neighborhood related to water quality and stormwater.

These three education programs thus came into effect roughly simultaneously, and

in a highly charged environment in which many citizens associated “stormwater” with

political conflict and problems with home sales. A very diverse set of stormwater education

and outreach needs were faced simultaneously by the municipalities subject to the MS4

permit, the City of South Burlington, and the Butler Farms neighborhood (among many

others). A comparison of the scale issues among these three settings (Figure 3, below)

illustrates the challenges for adapting social marketing to each setting. The responses

illustrate a wide spectrum of ways that social marketing techniques can be adapted to deal

with different needs, while capitalizing on work done elsewhere.

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Figure 3. Scope, Decision-Making and Financial Implications Geographic

Scope & Target Audience

Decision-Making Body

Key Regulatory Authority

Financial Implications for Target Audience

Chittenden County RSEP

17-municipality County; area served by major Burlington media

Ten-town Steering Committee governed by MOU

U.S. EPA & VT Agency of Natural Resources

None; objective is individual behavior change

South Burlington Stormwater Utility

Single municipality (16.1 square miles, 17,000 residents)

Five-member City Council

VT Enabling Legislation for Utilities; City Council

Average of $54.00 per household per year; average of $800 per business per year

RAN – Butler Farms Neighborhood Stormwater Upgrade

253 single-family households

Informal residents’ committee, with City Council and VT ANR

VT Agency of Natural Resources

Potentially $3,000 - $5,000 per household, financed over 10 years by City

III. Social Marketing Techniques: Starting with the Region, and Scaling Down

While the context and objectives for each of the three projects was somewhat

different, the Chittenden County Regional Stormwater Education Project (“the RSEP”)

became the foundation for the use of social marketing in the other two cases. The overall

purpose of the RSEP social marketing program is to cost-effectively close the gap between

the Chittenden County public’s current stormwater-related knowledge, attitudes and

behaviors and the desired knowledge and behaviors based on the EPA’s best management

practices (BMPs). The measurable outcomes in this case, described in more detail below,

were to achieve three goals during the five-year program: (1) People living and working in

the Chittenden County MS4s will be able to explain the link between stormwater runoff

and water quality; (2) People living and working in the Chittenden County MS4 areas will

be able to identify resources to help them maintain a stormwater-friendly lifestyle and

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spread the word to their friends and colleagues; and (3) People living and working in the

Chittenden County MS4 areas will adopt specific behavior and lifestyle changes identified

by the results of a 2003 public stormwater awareness survey.

Using social marketing techniques, the RSEP communications and marketing

strategy identifies the needs and wants of specific target audiences and identifies messages

designed to modify each target audience’s behaviors. The RSEP uses a combination of

television, radio, print, video, and a program Web site, as well as educational events, to

distribute messages linked to understanding stormwater and how individual behaviors

affect specific stormwater problems, such as pet waste, home projects, toxic chemicals, car

washing, erosion, and fertilizer.

For the RSEP campaign, Social Learning Theory (SLT) informed the assessment of

the interaction of personal factors, environmental influences, and stormwater-related

behaviors. A basic premise of SLT is that people learn not only through their own

experiences, but also by observing the actions of others and the results of those actions. SLT

also predicts that individuals can build confidence (self-efficacy) in their ability to take

action/change in small steps, if they are given information about the likely results of action,

combined with encouragement and clear benefits. A social norms approach was also used to

reinforce the perceived benefits of small individual stormwater behavior changes and to

overcome the perceived barrier of what could otherwise be seen as the overwhelming

challenge of achieving a large, collective behavior change before water quality is improved.

Diffusion of Innovations Theory addresses how new ideas, products, and social

practices spread within a society. The RSEP campaign activities were designed to stimulate

the diffusion of new social practices and perceived norms about stormwater-related

behaviors and products. These theories were selected because research suggests that a

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multi-level approach which includes awareness, social norms and an individual sense of

self-efficacy best support successful behavior change and maintenance.

To conserve resources, ads were developed for the RSEP by building, with

permission, from existing stormwater programs. Through background research on other

programs, specific messages and behaviors matching the targeted behavior changes for

Chittenden County were identified. For example, a pet waste TV ad developed for the city of

Tuscon, Arizona, matched both the message and behavior identified for the RSEP, but the

visual landscape of Tuscon is very different from the landscape in Chittenden County,

Vermont. A small portion of Tuscon’s ad could be used to reduce the costs of creating

material tailored to target audiences in Chittenden County.

In addition to the media campaign, the RSEP uses an interactive Web site called

“Smart Water Ways” (www.smartwaterways.org) to raise awareness and encourage positive

behavior change in Chittenden County residents. The Web site includes a five-minute video

and an interactive map that provides receiving water information for each of the

jurisdictions participating in the RSEP, as well as an overview of stormwater problems

related to targeted behaviors. Through the Web site, users can watch the cable television

advertisements or view the storyboards for the ads. They can also obtain fact sheets that

contain simple practices to address various stormwater problems. In the fifth year of the

RSEP social marketing campaign, the results of a post-campaign survey will be compared to

the 2003 baseline survey as one measurement of the program’s effectiveness in changing

stormwater knowledge, attitudes and behaviors.

South Burlington Stormwater Utility: Roughly two years after RSEP, the City of

South Burlington retained the consultant conducting the RSEP to prepare an outreach plan

in anticipation of adopting the State’s first stormwater utility – and the associated fee of

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http://www.smartwaterways.org


$4.50 per ERU per month, or about $54.00 per year for the typical household and $800

per year for a typical business or non-profit use. The desired outcome in this case was far

more focused, and targeted only to land owners within South Burlington: to build public

support for City Council’s anticipated adoption of a stormwater utility ordinance and fees,

and to prevent a voter backlash that could recall the ordinance and derail the process.

In strong contrast to the Butler Farms and RSEP efforts, the outreach plan focused

almost exclusively on costs and benefits to prospective rate payers and minimized behavior

change and larger watershed issues. This was a simple issue of triage: to get the utility up

and running with sufficient resources, there had to be a sufficiently direct relationship

between the utility’s costs, and the public operational needs and ratepayer benefits.

Ironically, the State’s permit problems made it much easier for the City to make the case

that having trained staff and resources to help with permit issues was worth the cost.

However, as in the other two cases, target audience definition – identifying similarly

affected groups of prospective ratepayers with common issues – was crucial and proved

highly successful. The outreach plan used meetings with different target audiences – large

ratepayers, institutional uses, condominium associations, medium-sized businesses – as an

important way to gather more information on citizens’ perceptions and needs around

stormwater. As an example, several common legal and permit renewal issues for lot owners

in commercial subdivisions were discovered that required State action. The City’s utility

staff has been able to address this with State regulators, where individual business owners

likely would not have been able to do so. This is a good example of how public managers

involved in stormwater can use the basic social marketing concept of target audiences to

tailor services more directly to community needs.

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Butler Farms – Redesigning the American Neighborhood: The third program to

get started was the Butler Farms – RAN project. Working with South Burlington staff, the

UVM-SNR faculty identified this neighborhood as an ideal laboratory for looking at how

stormwater treatment choices affect water quality in a typical American suburban

subdivision. Where social marketing is concerned, the desired outcome of this initiative is

to evaluate the impact of community decision-making on the choice and scale of

stormwater management interventions, and the subsequent impact on water quality.

Entering into Butler Farms in the midst of the State stormwater permit crisis took

time, patience, and persistence. Citizens just discovering that the title to their homes was

threatened by an expired stormwater permit, and that the new City fee of $54 per year

would not remove that threat, did not make an easy or receptive audience for social

marketing around behavior change and community decision-making. After some initial,

cautious outreach to a group of residents concerned about water quality, a pre-program

survey was administered by the University of Vermont and the results compared to the

RSEP survey (Figure 4). This information was then filtered by City staff and UVM-SNR

faculty to design an information program6. Through several presentations by the City and

UVM-SNR faculty, and additional mailings, neighborhood residents slowly came to sort out

issues of the State permit problems, the City utility, and their own homes. Once the roles

and responsibilities of different agencies were sorted out, it became clear that there is a

pressing need to work with the City, upgrade the neighborhood’s privately-owned

stormwater system to State standards, and turn over the system to the newly-formed

Stormwater utility – thereby relieving neighbors of individual responsibility for the state

6 Results on understanding of the overall stormwater system were very consistent, but the Butler Farms neighborhood had unusually high rates of pesticide, herbicide and fertilizer use compared to the region.

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Figure 4. Comparison of Regional and Butler Farms Survey Responses Chittenden County

Regional Survey Butler Farms

Neighborhood

Use pesticides? Yes

39%

82% No 61% 18%

Use lawn fertilizers? Yes

40%

85% No 60% 15%

Always clean up after pets? Yes

72%

73% No 28% 27%

Where does stormwater go? Don’t know 27% 32%

Streams/Lake Champlain 20% 19% Stormwater treatment system 27% 35%

Wastewater treatment plant 3% 10% Absorbed into ground 19% 2%

Other 4% 2% discharge permit. Roughly 25 citizens have formed a volunteer study group, under the

auspices of the City, which is now exploring the ecological, financial, and aesthetic

implications of different approaches to fixing the neighborhood’s system.

The UVM team is now applying an innovative approach called Participatory

Modeling, when discussion groups are formed around a systems model that is built with the

citizens’ participation, as an on-going process of collecting information, testing this

information against the knowledge available from the residents, and translating

assumptions and data sets into the formal language of dynamic models78. This serves as a

common ground for discussions and helps discipline the process of deliberation and

decision-making. Citizen participation is especially important to design scenarios for

change and to test the feasibility of the proposed management practices.

7 Gaddis, E., Vladich, H., Voinov, A. 2005. Participatory modeling and the dilemma of diffuse nitrogen management in a residential watershed. Enviironmental Modeling and Software (in press). 8 Van Den Belt, M., 2004. Mediated modeling: A systems dynamic approach to environmental consensus building, Island Press, Washington.

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IV. Lessons Learned

The over-arching theme from the experience in Chittenden County and South

Burlington can be summed up as educational triage in a social marketing context: choosing

the key desired outcome at a given program’s scale; defining and understanding the target

audience’s greatest barrier; and accepting that not all of the outcomes, particularly behavior

change, can be accomplished if the priority outcome has significant implications for the

audience. Put more bluntly, when asking a target audience for money for stormwater

projects, asking for behavior change may be asking too much and may undermine your key

objective – unless the behavior change has a sufficient financial incentive attached.

The scale of the financial implications is especially important in designing a message

and using social marketing. In general, the larger the potential financial burden, the less

likely households are to internalize simple behavior changes at the same time. Intensive,

detailed, and carefully presented information is needed for the projects with significant

financial implications, and can help move residents towards a solution. However, over-

loading the message with behavior change information can backfire and undermine the

overall goal – “I may have to pay $3,000, and now you want me to stop washing my car at

home?” Policy-makers must, faced with this situation, choose the more important outcome

and save the less pressing need for later. The exception, of course, is a sufficient financial

incentive makes the perceived cost of the behavior change worthwhile.

With respect to whole-systems thinking, all three programs indicate that scale and

the presence of financial issues play a major role in when and how to use social marketing

to introduce whole-systems thinking. The surveys from both the RSEP and RAN show that

in the absence of a strong education program, there is little systems thinking about regional

or neighborhood stormwater issues. Persistent themes of concern for the environment,

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paired with a disinclination to change individual behaviors, were present in both. The

neighborhood and regional surveys also are consistent with national findings that higher

levels of education do not necessarily translate into sound environmental decisions or a

willingness to accept whole-systems thinking. Citizens with advanced degrees often display

behavior patterns totally divorced from what best management practices recommend.

It is not yet clear to what extent the financial implications serve the purpose of

whole-systems thinking. The RAN team’s early discussions with neighborhood residents

about the systems approach to stormwater management garnered only lukewarm interest

and participation. But growing neighborhood awareness of the financial implications of the

Lowe’s case and City utility for home sales and costs invigorated the process dramatically,

and attendance at meetings jumped by an order of magnitude.

The challenge in Butler Farms now is to frame conversations about who pays, how

much and when in a whole-systems context. It appears that this combination of a large

potential financial impact, an intensive, detailed and neighborhood-specific education

program, and community decision-making, may offer the opportunity to incorporate

systems thinking into the choice of stormwater solutions. However, there is a constant

danger of “too much information,” and placing too many behavior change demands on

individuals faced with a large cost. The final outcome of this project hopefully will shed

some light on how these objectives can be balanced.

A municipally-scaled program with some financial impact is perhaps the trickiest of

the three scales and settings for social marketing and promoting whole-systems thinking. A

municipal program at this scale gives citizens the opportunity of communicating most

directly with elected officials, but also the threat of local ordinances, property taxes, and

fees. Social marketing campaigns must strike a careful balance between what a

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Pat Heffernan

The RSEP survey didn’t really address or identify any “disinclination”. It would, however, be fair to say that relunctance to change is common.


municipality can compel its citizens and land owners to do, through ordinance or fees, and

promoting what the governing body would like its citizens to do in the way of stormwater-

friendly behaviors. The fine line is between encouraging citizens to pick up after pets with

signs and poop-bag stations, and adopting an enforceable leash law or clean-up ordinance.

In addition, the variability of public discussion and opinions at the municipal scale

makes it especially difficult to stick to a long-term outreach and education plan with pre-

and post-implementation monitoring. A neighborhood-scaled project can and should

reflect the unique needs of a discrete group of residents with a defined physical and social

geography, and a multi-year regional project is less affected by the month-to-month

fluctuations of public opinion, letters to the editor, and statements at public meetings. In a

typical Phase II MS4 community, however, the tenor of a single City Council meeting can

swing the debate, or create a distracting issue requiring a quick and flexible response.

The best scale of outreach in the South Burlington experience came at the target

audience level, where City administrators were able to identify common stormwater issues

that were best addressed by the public sector. The Utility’s ability to respond to needs

defined by the target audiences (e.g. providing an authoritative “FAQ” document about

State permits for homeowners’ associations and developing a model process for commercial

subdivisions with single discharge permits) has built strong support and goodwill towards

the City’s utility. Above and below this level, however, municipal outreach had to stick to

the basics of costs and benefits of services to be effective.

The hope for greater whole-systems thinking at the municipal, neighborhood, and

regional levels is in greater citizen engagement in decision-making and reinforcement of

social norms for acceptable individual behaviors. Citizen engagement is a costly and

intensive process that may be hard to afford and accomplish on a statewide or even a larger

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municipal scale. The RAN-Butler Farms case study, which is showing great promise in this

area, is still somewhat special, enjoying financial support from the U.S. EPA and the City.

Balancing the high costs and time needed for full scale citizen education and involvement

programs, with the need for significant and urgent capital programs and permit

compliance, is a challenge yet to be conquered.

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Documents

Juli Beth Hinds, AICP (Director of Planning & Zoning, City ...ran/...education_conference_South_Burlington_example.pdfAdapting and Scaling Social Marketing Techniques to Regional,